For the digital assignments this week, I took it upon myself to learn some more techniques in Audacity. For the radio show, my group agreed that we’d like to start our segment out with a commercial followed by a bumper. At the end, we agreed to have a bumper and then a commercial, essentially opposite of the start, to transition out of the story. I decided to take on one of the commercials and the bumper at the end, which I’ll showcase and talk a little bit about in this post.

I wanted to create something interesting to listen to, so I looked around online, sifting through YouTube videos and forums, to figure out how to effectively apply noise reduction to audio clips. Then, I learned how to add a tasteful amount of reverb to voices to create an ethereal effect. This came in handy for both the bumper and the commercial, as the bumper uses reverb to achieve that aforementioned ethereal effect that works well with sci-fi themes, and the commercial utilizes reverb to create the presence of a God-like being.

For the bumper, I really wanted to have the atmosphere of a sci-fi spaceship to carry through from the story. Though we haven’t quite developed the ambiance with sound effects for the actual story itself quite yet, I’m sure that whatever we come up with will pair nicely with the bumper. For all of the sound effects, I used freesound.org, a site where individuals can upload sounds that they created or recorded. It didn’t take long to find a spaceship hum, a futuristic terminal beep, and light beeping of a cockpit for background noise. Most of the sounds I used were on the very first page of my search! I figured that speaking with a whispery, somber voice would also work well with the story as Coroner’s Tale is a bit creepy and dark. I also thought that it would be a nice touch to throw in a bit of a “thank you” from the cast for listening to our hard work while also taking the opportunity to promote the hard work of other classmates.

When it comes to the commercial, I felt that it in no way had to relate to the content of the show whatsoever. If anything, I thought that it would be a good idea to create something more silly as a sort of juxtaposition against the serious and intense content of Coroner’s Tale. A lot of the making of this went into simply writing the script and doing a bit of voice acting to achieve vastly different voices for a conversation. Honestly, this was strictly fun to make. I didn’t run into any problems and once again found it very easy to find sound effects from freesound.org. I began by finding the sound of someone throwing away some trash and closing the bin, a way to set the tone for Gary the garbage man. Then, I found city street noises to add in as a subtle background to help set the scene and add some interest across the whole commercial. After that, I found a car crash noise to add in when Gary runs across the street. The voice acting for Gary and “Mr. God” was super fun, especially considering the fact that I tried to make the commercial funny. There were multiple times where I had to re-record some lines because I couldn’t help but laugh during or at the end of them. Some lines I had to redo because I couldn’t even get them out in the first place without breaking. At the end, I added in a very deep voice to restate the name of the product briefly. Surprisingly, most of what you hear in that voice is natural, as somehow I was able to pull out an incredibly deep tone. To help, though, I bass boosted it a bit with the equalizer effect.

And there you have it: two completed segments for our group’s broadcast. I’m really looking forward to the reactions of classmates upon either seeing this post or hearing the show on the radio. Please let me know what you guys think!~